The 1972 Belgrade Film Festival was the place to be. Godina assembled a motley crew of international and domestic festival guests: Tinto Brass, Puriša Đorđević, Miloš Forman, Buck Henry, Dušan Makavejev, Paul Morrisey, Bogdan Tirnanić, and Frederick Wiseman. Every night after the official festival screenings and talks, they went to a tiny apartment with a 35mm camera fixed in a corner. Godina challenged each of his celebrated guests to create a short film, following a set of simple rules: one room, one camera position, no zooms, tilts or pans, a couple of minutes each. And in every short the words “I Miss Sonia Henie”, a famous quote from the Snoopy cartoons, had to be voiced. The rest was left entirely to individual imaginations. The result: I Miss Sonia Henie (1972), a conceptual masterpiece of absurdist black humour, seven distinctively different variations on a ludicrous theme, a cinephile’s wet dreams. The restoration of these significant short films has been completed in the same year in which the Slovenian Cinematheque celebrates its 20th meaningful year of existence.

Jurij Meden